If Nuns Ruled the World (13 page)

Then they gambled for Sister Dianna's body.

“Heads I go first, tails you go,” one said. “Heads. She's mine.”

Sister Dianna shifted her weight into him, softened her rigid stance, and commanded her hands to touch his body.

“Hey, she wants me,” the captor bragged.

She'd had enough. She mustered all of the grit she wished she'd had when they forced her to harm the woman. She stepped quickly backward, thrusting her knee with all of the strength of her five-foot frame into his groin. He tossed her to the floor like a bale of hay.

“Forgive me, please. Give me another chance,” she begged. A fist rammed into her stomach.

He climbed on top of her and tore at her clothes, reeking of alcohol, cigarettes, and body odor.

“I want to see your pretty face,” he said, snatching her blindfold away while he slid his slimy tongue across her eyelids, nose, and cheeks. He pried open her eyes and ripped her jeans and underwear off. His eyes were just black holes, devoid of any emotion.

As he finished, he whispered in her ear, “
Gracias
. Your God is dead.”

They blindfolded her and prepared to rape her again, yelling out in Spanish to a new man. This one was tall with fair skin. He responded in perfect English and with no trace of an accent, “Shit!”

In broken Spanish, he began swearing. “Idiots! She's a North American nun and it is all over the news.”

“Are you American?” Sister Dianna asked the new man.

“Why do you want to know?” he answered her in Spanish.

He had her clothes brought to her and helped her put on her T-shirt and sweatshirt.

“Come on. Let's get out of here,” he said, as if it had been an option she could have exercised all along, as if the door to freedom had always been just a polite question and a few steps away.

“I'm sorry, so sorry. It was a mistake,” he said, leading her down a long hallway. “You must forgive them. They had the wrong person. They thought you were Veronica Ortiz Hernandez.”

She knew they didn't think she was Veronica Ortiz Hernandez. Ms. Hernandez was a leftist guerilla freedom fighter. The death threats she received were addressed to Madre Dianna, not Veronica Ortiz.

The man Sister Dianna suspected of being an American ushered her into the passenger seat of a gray Suzuki jeep with a rabbit's foot dangling from the rearview mirror. His hair was brown, curly, and too shiny. She suspected it was a wig.

“I'll take you to a friend at the US embassy who can help you leave the country,” he said over classical music playing on the radio. “We tried to warn you with threats to prevent this. You wouldn't leave.” Anger tinged his voice.

“I stayed because I have a commitment to the people,” she said.

“I have a commitment to the people too, to liberate them from Communists.”

“Your commitment is different because you don't respect human life,” she replied.

Why was she arguing with him? She couldn't stop herself. She began to wonder whether they were actually heading for the US embassy. Why would he tell her these things and then set her free?

Sister Dianna looked around. The traffic was picking up. She saw a sign for Zone 5. Zone 5 meant they were close to the capital.

At a red light, the American slowed the car. She opened the door and jumped out, bracing herself as she hit the pavement. She ran as fast as she could. She didn't look back.

She ran straight into an indigenous woman. “Sister Dianna,” the woman said, apparently recognizing her from the news.

“I escaped,” Sister Dianna was able to cough.

“Come with me,” the woman said, and grabbed her arm. “You'll be safe.”

The woman guided her into a little house and brought her chamomile tea and a plate of beans and tortillas. Her body was numb and tears gushed down her cheeks. The woman told Sister Dianna to rest and pray, but she felt she needed a plan. She needed to leave the country. Her passport was all the way in Zone 1, locked in the manager's desk at Hayter's Travel. Sister Dianna told her host she needed to get to Zone 1. The woman gave her directions and bus fare. “Don't tell anyone anything about me,” she warned as she said good-bye.

Once at the travel agency, Sister Dianna was able to call Sister Darleen and was moved to the Vatican embassy. The next three days, she bathed every hour, spending the rest of the time facedown in bed.

The headlines all said “US Nun Released.” She wanted to tell them that that wasn't true. She wasn't released. She escaped. She didn't know whom to tell. She didn't know who would believe her.

Her torturers had told her repeatedly that no one would ever believe her story, and as it turns out, they were right. The Guatemalan government was quick to deny any involvement in her kidnapping. “What happened to Dianna Ortiz was self-kidnapping,” the stories in Guatemala said.

According to General Carlos Morales, the minister of the interior for Guatemala: “In no moment did police authorities have anything to do with this incident and for this reason the government has closed the case.” Guatemalan defense minister Hector Gramajo told an Americas Watch investigator that Sister Dianna was abducted when she snuck out to meet a lesbian lover. Gramajo called her accusations a big injustice to Guatemala and to its security forces.

The Bush administration, too, doubted Sister Dianna's credibility.

In one cable to Washington, then-ambassador Thomas F. Stroock, a newly arrived political appointee of the president, wrote that he rejected her claim that the man who led her out of the secret prison was a North American who spoke Spanish poorly and cursed in English.

“I know something happened to her in Guatemala,” Mr. Stroock told
Washington Post
reporter Frank Smyth over the phone from Wyoming. “What I don't know is what it was. I don't know whether to believe her or not.”

“I felt betrayed,” Sister Dianna later told me through anguished tears. “I don't think I have ever really shared with people how betrayed and hurt I felt by my country and my government. I think I learned to hide my feelings. I had more than a hundred and eleven cigarette burns on my back and elsewhere. I had proof,” she said. “When I think of their accusations, those words are like having cigarettes put out on my body all over again.”

She was taken to her parents' home in Grants, New Mexico, her mind foggy and thick with amnesia from PTSD caused by the trauma. Sister Dianna described all of her memories as intermingled with the torture.

“Every part of me ceased to exist,” she said.

When she walked through the small adobe house, a woman she didn't recognize fell at her feet.

“
Mi Hijita
,” she wailed. It was her mother. Sister Dianna backed away. A man, her father, threw his arm around her. He reeked of cigarettes, which only served to remind her of the burns freckling her back and shoulder blades. In that moment, the smell of burning flesh overwhelmed her. She kept her mouth shut, pretended to know them.

When she returned to her community of sisters, she couldn't remember having been a nun.

“For a while I thought I didn't belong in this community because I didn't have memories, and I thought, Why am I here if I don't remember?” she said. But the sisters were supportive. They shared pictures and letters she had written to them. She slowly began to remember that she became a sister because she wanted to be of service.

In the years after her torture, Sister Dianna looked to the words of Jean Améry, an Austrian essayist and philosopher who was tortured by the Nazis. “Gone was the God to whom I had committed my life. Gone was trust, the very idea of justice betrayed. Gone was all I had believed in. Everything that defined me as a human being ceased to exist,” he wrote about his own experience. Améry's words brought her comfort. She, too, still felt tortured and uneasy about living in the world. The words seemed written just for her. She took comfort in there being another person on Earth who understood what she went through at the hands of her torturers. Years later she learned that Jean Améry had killed himself. Many times she thought about how easy it would be to take that option herself and end all of her pain.

She had two years of therapy at the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture, the first community-­based comprehensive torture treatment center for refugees and people seeking asylum in the United States. It was there that she figured out how to put her experience in perspective and began to find her voice.

In 1996, Sister Dianna camped outside the White House for several weeks, surviving only on bread and water. She wanted the government to acknowledge what had happened to her and to the Guatemalan people.

“Prior to that time I had been trying to obtain information about my case and I was calling on President Clinton and the US government to release documents related to torture in Guatemala,” she explained. She began her silent vigil in Lafayette Park across from the White House, joined sporadically by hundreds of supporters. President Clinton wrote to her on March 29, promising to release “all appropriate information” to her. Sister Dianna spent most of her time sitting silently on a blanket.

On April 5, then First Lady and future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Sister Dianna for a half hour to express her concern and assure her that her husband was determined to get her the information she was seeking.

Sister Dianna only broke down once in front of Mrs. Clinton, while she was discussing how her torturers forced her to put her hands on a machete and cut her fellow captive. A few classified documents were eventually released, accompanied by considerable publicity, but they remained heavily redacted and the identity of her torturers was not revealed.

For her own sanity, Sister Dianna Mae Ortiz had to find a way to move on, a way to put her own ordeal behind her.

“For a lot of years I directed my energy to Guatemala and I thought only of the Guatemalan people. Because of the horror I witnessed, I think I was blind to the torture happening all over the rest of the world,” she said. But then she began to meet other survivors, ordinary people: aid workers, engineers, accountants, doctors, student activists from all over the United States, Asia, the Middle East, and South America.

“Through them, a sort of blindfold was lifted from my eyes. I saw that torture was a worldwide epidemic and I realized the importance of founding an organization that was comprised entirely of survivors of torture who could help one another.”

That realization led Sister Dianna to create the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, or TASSC, in 1998. It was a group that allowed torture survivors to speak openly about their experiences as a way to heal. They spoke out to spread the word about torture around the globe and provided torture survivors and their families with legal, psychological, and medical support.

The goal was lofty: to ensure that what happened to them would not happen to anyone ever again. On June 26, 2000, Sister Dianna traveled with eighteen other survivors of torture, from all over the world, to speak with an official of the National Security Council. In a pale-green room in the Old Executive Office Building, just west of the White House, all eighteen of them pled for an end to the US funding and practicing of torture around the globe.

“People tend to think that when a person manages to escape from a situation of torture, it is just like the end to any other story. But . . . for the majority of survivors, the act of survival is far worse than the torture itself,” Sister Dianna told me.

In 2002, Sister Dianna wrote a memoir entitled
The Blindfold's Eyes
. More than 500 pages long, it features a picture of her on the cover, a small cross at her collarbone, her eyes laden with an inescapable pain. In 2010, she wrote to President Barack Obama to ask for the president's leadership in ending the country's involvement in any kind of torture anywhere in the world.

That letter went viral when the actress Mariska Hargitay, a star of the series
Law and Order: SVU
, read it aloud at a fund-raiser.

“Dear President Obama, on November 2, 1989, I was burned with cigarettes more than 111 times,” Sister Dianna had written. “I was raped over and over again, and that was only the beginning. Mr. President, from anonymous graves voices still cry out. . . . Torture does not end with the release from some clandestine prison. It is not something we ‘get over.' Simply looking forward is not an option for us . . . memories cling to us. . . . No one fully recovers from torture. The damage can never be undone. We have been beaten, hanged by wrists, arms, or legs, burned by electrical devices or cigarettes, bitten by humans and dogs, cut or stabbed with knives or machetes. And this is only a sample of what has been done to us. What a cruel irony that it is the tortured one and not the torturer who feels shame.”

For more than ten years, Sister Dianna served as the director of TASSC. In 2012, she decided she needed to take some time for herself to continue her own healing process. Nevertheless, the idea of taking any kind of time for herself makes her uneasy.

“I kind of feel guilty about it,” she told me. “The idea of just being able to be still and breathe is frightening.”

I had sent Sister Dianna an e-mail with my questions before we spoke because she told me she had difficulty remembering some of the things that had happened to her and thinking about the questions ahead of time helps to jog her memory. One of the questions I wanted to ask her was whether she had any regrets. Once we got on the phone, she told me she thought about that question for a long time before she was ready for our interview.

“Even after all these years, I still travel back in time and I continue to ask the same questions. What would Jesus have done under those circumstances? And each time, the answer remains the same: He would have continued to journey with the people. I have no regrets about the situation,” she said, her voice cracking. “Am I happy my dignity and human rights were violated? Am I happy that the brutal acts of those who are children of God shattered my life to the point that I am afraid of my own shadow? Of course not.